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A recent critique of Karl Polanyi reveals more about the limits of our current political debates than anything about the man himself.

Reading Polanyi is admittedly a frustrating experience. He mixes high theory, historical narrative, and overheated journalistic polemic into a distinct mélange. Yet at the center of his thinking is a brilliant idea: that the three core “inputs” of the economy—labor, land, and money—are what he calls “fictitious” commodities. By this, Polanyi means that, try as we might, workers are never going to move at a moment’s notice to wherever markets dictate, markets aren’t going to replenish rivers and fields, and governments will bail out banks to keep money flowing. To take one not-exactly-random example: Since land, to Polanyi, is more than just a resource for market exchange, so too will housing only ever be a partial commodity. Access to housing is a vital interest, and so democracies will face pressure to introduce a variety of regulations that “distort” housing markets. So, it is hardly surprising that the financial crisis was centered on mortgages—try as we might, we will never get housing markets to be the smooth, frictionless edifices imagined by economists. A house cannot be moved like a bushel of wheat. Adelman misses the significance of these arguments because he reduces Polanyi’s thinking to the binary of morality or markets. But the central opposition, for Polanyi, is democracy or markets. Democratic demands for social protection conflict with the dictates of the market, a fact that is ever more apparent in our era of financial capitalism.